The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories

This report by the Georgetown Environmental Law & Policy Institute, entitled The Track Record on Takings Legislation: Lessons from Democracy\u27s Laboratories, examines the experiences of Florida, Oregon, and several other states with legislation implementing the property rights agenda. The report is the first comprehensive effort to systematically identify and evaluate the on-the-ground consequences of so-called takings compensation laws. The major findings of the report are that the takings agenda has undermined community protections by forcing a roll back of existing legal rules and/or by exerting a chilling effect on new legislative activity, special interests such as developers and timber companies have been the primary beneficiaries of takings legislation, the takings laws have fomented and exacerbated neighbor-neighbor conflicts over land use issues, the takings agenda has conferred large windfalls on certain owners either in the form of taxpayer-funded awards or special exemptions from the rules that apply to the rest of the community, and the property rights agenda has undermined the democratic process. Contrary to a common argument made by proponents of this type of legislation, requiring the government to pay to regulate does not lead government officials to make a more nuanced appraisal of the costs and benefits of regulations, apparently because the salience of fiscal costs to government officials far outweighs the relatively more diffuse political benefits of community and homeowner protection

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits?

25 pages

Regulatory Takings and Resources: What Are the Constitutional Limits?

25 pages

Assessment of Neuropsychological Trajectories in Longitudinal Population-Based Studies of Children

This paper provides a strategy for the assessment of brain function in longitudinal cohort studies of children. The proposed strategy invokes both domain-specific and omnibus intelligence test approaches. In order to minimise testing burden and practice effects, the cohort is divided into four groups with one-quarter tested at 6-monthly intervals in the 0–2-year age range (at ages 6 months, 1.0, 1.5 and 2.0 years) and at annual intervals from ages 3–20 (one-quarter of the children at age 3, another at age 4, etc). This strategy allows investigation of cognitive development and of the relationship between environmental influences and development at each age. It also allows introduction of new domains of function when age-appropriate. As far as possible, tests are used that will provide a rich source of both longitudinal and cross-sectional data. The testing strategy allows the introduction of novel tests and new domains as well as piloting of tests when the test burden is relatively light. In addition to the recommended tests for each age and domain, alternative tests are described. Assessment methodology and knowledge about child cognitive development will change over the next 20 years, and strategies are suggested for altering the proposed test schedule as appropriate

Horne v. Department of Agriculture: Expanding Per Se Takings While Endorsing State Sovereign Ownership of Wildlife

In Horne v. Department of Agriculture, the Supreme Court expanded its so-called per se analysis under the Takings Clause to government actions impairing possession of personal property. The Court decided that a New Deal era agricultural program effected a taking by requiring raisin growers to turn over a portion of their crops in certain years to a governmental body that disposes of the raisins in noncompetitive markets. The raisin marketing program, which by law only persists with continuing support from the raisin industry itself, aims to control the market supply of raisins, and thereby elevate and stabilize the prices received by raisin growers. Despite the unusual character of the program, a majority of the Court ruled that certain dissident raisin growers were entitled to prevail on their theory that government appropriations of personal property interests in raisins were governed by the same per se takings rule that applies to government appropriations of real property. The Court\u27s analysis of the takings issue is problematic for a number of reasons , including 1) the fact that these particular plaintiffs, who were proceeding in the capacity of raisin handlers, were not the actual owners of the raisins at issue, and therefore could not legitimately claim a taking of their private property; 2) the Court\u27s modern precedents and traditional practice support the idea that government has broader latitude in controlling personal property than real property, contradicting the Court\u27s new per se rule; 3) there was a substantial question as to whether the program imposed an unconstitutional taking of property without just compensation, given the significant offsetting benefits growers received from this price support system; and 4) the Court failed to give the government the opportunity to defend the conditions imposed on raisin growers by showing that that the conditions satisfied the standards articulated in Nollan v. California Coastal Commission and Dolan v. City of Tigard. Each of these issues provided a proper basis for affirming the Ninth Circuit\u27s rejection of the takings argument. Nevertheless, Chief Justice John Roberts\u27 majority opinion either ignored or skimmed over all these issues and applied a per se takings rule to this context. Figuring out the implications of the Horne decision for drug forfeiture laws, unwholesome food recalls, and animal cruelty statutes has been left to other days and other cases. The Horne decision did include an unexpected result of considerable benefit to government defendants, however: the Court distinguished the raisin marketing program from a similar program involving oysters that it upheld against a takings challenge in a 1929 decision. The Chief Justice explained that, unlike raisins, oysters were public property. The Court thereby ratified the venerable but somewhat misunderstood doctrine of sovereign ownership of wildlife. States employ this doctrine, inherited from England and nearly universally adopted by American states, to uphold wildlife conservation regulations and defeat claims of private ownership. Often referred to as the wildlife trust, the doctrine is the kind of background principle of property law that the Court recognized as defeating claims of takings in its 1992 decision of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Commission. In this article we examine the Horne decision in some detail. Although the case does extend the Court\u27s takings jurisprudence to an uncertain extent by applying the per se analysis to personal property, we think the long-term ramifications of the decision lie in the Court\u27s recognition of the sovereign ownership of wildlife. That doctrine not only will defeat private takings claims but should sanction affirmative regulation of wildlife and protection for its habitat, authorize government actions to recover damages against those harming wildlife and wildlife habitat, and reinforce public standing to enforce the wildlife trust

Space mapping and defect correction

In this paper we show that space-mapping optimization can be understood in the framework of defect correction. Then, space-mapping algorithms can be seen as special cases of defect correction iteration. In order to analyze properties of space mapping and the space-mapping function we introduce the new concept of flexibility of the underlying models. The best space-mapping results are obtained for so-called equally flexible models. By introducing an affine operator as a left preconditioner, two models can be made equally flexible, at least in the neighborhood of a solution. This motivates an improved space-mapping (or manifold-mapping) algorithm. The left preconditioner complements traditional space mapping where only a right preconditioner is used. In the last section a few simple examples illustrate some of the phenomena analyzed in this pape

Manifold mapping: a two-level optimization technique

In this paper, we analyze in some detail the manifold-mapping optimization technique introduced recently [Echeverría and Hemker in space mapping and defect correction. Comput Methods Appl Math 5(2): 107-–136, 2005]. Manifold mapping aims at accelerating optimal design procedures that otherwise require many evaluations of time-expensive cost functions.We give a proof of convergence for the manifold-mapping iteration. By means of two simple optimization problemswe illustrate the convergence results derived. Finally, the performances of several variants of the method are compared for some design problems from electromagnetics